Respect for the Dead
by Steven Pemberton
Part Three
© 1996-2002
This book is split into three parts, mostly to save on bandwidth. This file is part 3. Parts 1 and 2 are at http://www.pembers.net/fiction/respect.html and http://www.pembers.net/fiction/respect2.html, respectively. The three parts form a single story; if you haven’t already read parts 1 and 2, I’d suggest you read them before reading this part.
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With that necessary unpleasantness out of the way, let's get on with the story...
Mard’s radio chimed. He looked up from the cheap novel he was watching. It was rare for anyone to want him when he was off-duty. It usually meant that there was some sort of emergency. The radio chimed again. Reluctantly, he picked it up and pressed the Answer button.
“Sergeant Mard,” he said.
“This is Communications Centre, Sir,” said a woman’s voice. “I have an external call for you. The caller says it’s urgent.”
“Who’s calling?” he asked. He couldn’t imagine who outside the camp might want to talk to him at this time of night.
“Sir, the caller identifies himself as Doctor Hamesh, of Serendipity Base.”
Mard tried not to swear. He had dealt with the Doctor a few times before, and had found each occasion a thoroughly disquieting experience. What was the Fellowship coming to, that it would accept people like that into its ranks?
“Sir, do you wish to accept the call?” The woman sounded concerned. Communication capacity was tightly rationed these days; every second that he delayed represented considerable expense for both Serendipity Base and Camp Fidelity. He had no choice, really: Fellows were obliged to help one another, and even without that lever, the Doctor was not a man to tolerate a refusal from someone like Mard. Whatever the Doctor wanted, it would almost certainly be Mard who would have to face the consequences.
“Put him through,” he said. There was a beep, and the character of the background noise from the radio changed slightly. “This is Sergeant Mard,” he announced.
“Mard?” said the caller. “This is your friend the Doctor. Is there anybody around who might overhear us?”
“No,” answered Mard. “I’m in my quarters.”
“Is this channel clean?”
“Probably. There might be some low-level automatic monitoring, that alerts Communications Centre if you use certain key words.”
“I’ll be circumspect, then,” said Hamesh.
“Is your end clean?” asked Mard.
“Of course.” He sounded surprised that Mard thought the question necessary.
For a moment Mard was silent. Then: “What do you want from me, Doctor?”
“A number of things,” Hamesh replied. “Two... people with whom I have some acquaintance have recently become an embarrassment to me.” The word “people,” with a pause before it, was an agreed code-word between them. It meant “exhumees.” “I believe you will have recently become acquainted with one of them.”
“Maybe,” said Mard noncommittally. “I get acquainted with a lot of people in this job. What’s this person’s name?”
“I can’t risk telling you that. What I can tell you is that it’s likely that this person will claim to have skills and knowledge which his records quite clearly indicate he does not have. Do you know whom I mean now?”
“No,” growled Mard. “Let me think.”
“Be quick. This call’s using most of my communication ration for this month.”
Too bad, thought Mard. If the Doctor’s ration ran out partway through the call, so much the better. The Doctor was talking about a recent arrival from Serendipity Base, who would have claimed to be something that he obviously wasn’t... yes... only about 10 days ago, Holeth had dragged him out of his office to hear a ludicrous appeal by an ex who’d been a painter in his first life, but who’d said he was a computer expert, of all things. The ex was quite an old one. His name was Prentice, with a couple of old-fashioned titles in front of it. Mard wondered how Hamesh had known about Prentice’s lie. Had he told the same story at Serendipity Base? Or had another Fellow at the camp passed that information back to Hamesh? It didn’t really matter. “Yes,” he told Hamesh, “I know who you mean now.”
“Good. The second... person is someone whose acquaintance you will make shortly.”
“I can’t wait,” said Mard, making no attempt to hide his sarcasm. Another arrival from Serendipity Base, then.
“She is one who studies the past, in an effort to learn from it.” A female historian. “I believe she knows the other, although she denies it.”
“And what does all this have to do with me?” asked Mard, knowing that he wasn’t going to like the answer.
“As I told you,” the Doctor replied, “these two are an embarrassment to me.”
It hadn’t sunk in the first time. “You can’t be serious,” he whispered.
“I am serious, Mard. That’s why I’m asking.”
“You’re pushing my obligations to their limits.”
“I appreciate that. If an opportunity arises, I’ll repay you handsomely.”
“Thank you,” muttered Mard. He suspected that Hamesh would go to some lengths to ensure that no such opportunity did arise. “All right. I’ll do my best. No guarantees. I have my own interests to look after as well.”
“Thank you, Mard,” said Hamesh. He didn’t sound particularly grateful. “I think it would be best if you were to make this person’s acquaintance here, rather than there.”
“You want me to fetch her myself?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“The woman will have in her possession an item which no doubt will be of considerable interest to your colleagues.”
“What is it?” asked Mard.
“I can’t risk telling you that.” There was some pleasure in Hamesh’s voice. He was a sadist, and he knew that Mard hated uncertainty and not knowing things. Even if it had been perfectly safe for Hamesh to tell him what the item was, there was a good chance he would have withheld the information anyway, just for the sake of enjoying Mard’s reaction. “I assure you, though,” the Doctor continued, “it’s nothing that will cause any embarrassment to you or your colleagues. Nevertheless, some of your colleagues will no doubt be so interested in this item that they would want it for themselves, if they knew about it.”
“Who do you think I am, Doctor?” Mard demanded. “God’s second cousin?” Hamesh was asking him to ensure that the woman got through the security checks at the camp perimeter without the item (whatever it was) being detected. He might as well have asked Mard to halt the Moon in its orbit.
“I seem to recall, Sergeant,” said Hamesh with some indifference, “that the last time we spoke, you were in charge of a number of rotas, including one which I need not name, but which I think can be adjusted to solve this problem.” Obviously, Hamesh was referring to the rota for perimeter security.
“I choose who goes there, yes,” Mard conceded, “but they certainly don’t take their orders from me.”
“Really, Sergeant, you disappoint me. Is there no-one who owes you favours? No-one who feels a need to impress you?”
“That’s irrelevant. I don’t know about Serendipity Base, but around here we have rules, and we follow them.” He paused, wishing there was some clean, honourable way out of this. Then: “Wait. There is somebody I think I could persuade...”
“Good,” said Hamesh. “I knew there would be.”
“Is there anything else?” Mard asked.
“No, that’s all, thank you. Remember: the most important thing is that those two are an embarrassment to me. The rest is more or less irrelevant.”
“I’ll remember,” said Mard. And pray that I forget as soon as it’s over, he added to himself. He pressed the End call button without waiting for anything more from Hamesh.
Mard carefully replaced his radio on the table and sat down. Doctor Hamesh had just turned his small, carefully-ordered world upside down. Could he really be serious? And was Mard going to be able to carry out his request?
The word “embarrassment” amongst Fellows was a euphemism for “threat.” To say to another Fellow: “So-and-so is an embarrassment to me” meant: “I want you to neutralise the threat that So-and-so poses to me.” To send someone to a labour camp was usually more than enough. Hamesh, though, had already done that, and he still felt insecure. Perhaps he thought that these two were likely to escape, or that someone else would discover them and root out whatever secret he wanted buried. Mard couldn’t imagine what had passed between them and Hamesh to make the doctor feel so seriously threatened by them.
There was only one thing Mard could do to “neutralise” somebody who was already in a labour camp. Kill them. The implant, of course, would do its best to keep the body in a serviceable condition, so he would have to damage the exhumees enough that the cost of repairs was significantly more than the value of the work they were likely to be able to do after a second exhumation. Alternatively, switching off the ex’s implants would guarantee them to be irretrievably dead within three minutes. It was certainly less messy than the first option; the only problem was that nobody below the camp commander had access to the equipment needed to do it. Even he had to get approval from his superior before it was actually permitted.
Mard sat silent for some time, deep in unaccustomed thought. Eventually he picked up the radio again and keyed a code. A woman answered.
“Holeth?” he said. “This is Mard. Come to my quarters. I want to discuss something with you.”
“So, Lieutenant,” asked the Director, “what information have you got out of Thander today?”
“Exactly as much as yesterday, Sir,” Asheg replied with some bitterness. “None. She’s said about three words all day.” He was standing to attention, but was finding it hard not to fidget. He could imagine how Thander had felt standing in this spot, two days previously. At least the Director hadn’t dimmed the lights this time.
“Have other officers questioned her?”
“Yes, Sir. Paran, Sekath and Ter all tried. They couldn’t make her talk, either.”
“You have another 20 hours to persuade her. Or find some other evidence. Otherwise, we will have to release her.” Having arrested somebody, Security could detain that person for up to 72 hours, to question them and to gather further evidence. At the end of that time, if there was no new information, the suspect had to be sentenced or released. They already had enough evidence to send Thander to a labour camp for at least twice the usual term. But both Asheg and the Director felt that there was much more to this case than they had so far discovered. Under the circumstances, sentencing her to labour would feel like releasing her without punishment. Thander must have had an accomplice, possibly more than one, to avoid being sent to a labour camp when she was exhumed, and to keep her undetected at Serendipity Base for so long. It was almost certainly somebody else at the base, somebody who had been there at least as long as Thander. Unfortunately, that description fitted almost everybody. Citizens rarely left the base once they were employed there, which made Thander one of the newer arrivals.
“What did you find in Thander’s rooms?” asked the Director.
“We found nothing remarkable in her sleeping room, Sir. We haven’t searched her office yet.”
“Why not?”
“Well, Sir, it’s a little complicated. Shortly before she was arrested, she gave an order to Mandarin to lock the office in the event of her arrest.”
“You can override that order, surely,” remarked the Director, frowning.
“I can, Sir, but I think it best not to, at least for the time being.”
“Why not?” demanded the Director. “Did she booby-trap the place?”
“We didn’t detect any traps, Sir,” replied Asheg, with a touch of sarcasm. “The camera inside her office shows nothing unexpected. The reason I want to leave the door locked is that Thander ordered Mandarin to unlock the door five days after her arrest. That suggests that there’s something in her office which she wants to be discovered after that time, tucked away in a drawer or a cupboard, or underneath the pile of papers on her desk.”
“Why wait?”
“Because I don’t know whom she wants to make the discovery. I suspect, though, that it’s her accomplice, whoever that turns out to be. I think that if we leave the door alone, then not long after it opens, somebody will turn up and make straight for whatever it is that Thander’s hiding. If we open the door before then, that could well warn that person to stay away.”
“Her accomplice surely knows she’s been arrested,” the Director pointed out. “Is that not warning enough?”
“But the order was conditional on her arrest. So she must intend the discovery to happen after that.”
“It could just as easily be us whom she intends to discover the whatever-it-is,” said the Director. “Perhaps she knows that she cannot prevent its discovery, and she just wants to be well away from the consequences. It would be a great embarrassment to us if this thing provides evidence that she has done something worse than we have already proven. If we do nothing before those five days are up, Thander will be settling into her new life at Camp Fidelity. You know how difficult it is to persuade them to release an exhumee once they have put her to work.”
Difficult? Asheg thought. More like impossible. “I’m willing to take that chance, Sir,” he said, although he wasn’t entirely sure. “To judge from what I’ve discovered from her records and from talking to her colleagues, she’s not the type of person who would commit any of the crimes that are punishable by a term in a prison camp. If there are any further crimes to be discovered, I think we’ll find it was her accomplice who committed them.”
“Have you interviewed Doctor Hamesh?” the Director asked.
“I have, Director. He was very polite and co-operative, but he said nothing more than last week, when he told me that he suspected Thander was an exhumee.”
“What did he tell you?” Asheg hadn’t given the Director all the details of this.
“Well, Sir,” answered Asheg, “he said that on the 4th of Six, Thander came to him with pain in the muscles of her neck. While he was touching it to diagnose the problem, he felt something hard under the base of her skull, where no bone should have been. The following day, the thought came to him that the hardness could be an implant, and he reported his suspicion to me.”
“That was all he said?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Why is he your prime suspect for Thander’s accomplice?”
He wasn’t just the prime suspect; at the moment, he was the only suspect. Asheg replied: “I checked the medical records, Sir. Hamesh did carry out an examination of Thander on the date in question. However, the output of the mediscan showed nothing that would cause pain in her neck.”
“Could it have been stress?” asked the Director. “Or fear of being discovered, perhaps?”
“That’s what I thought, Sir. So I ordered another examination of Thander today, including her brain and nervous system this time, in case the problem was psychosomatic. That didn’t find anything either.”
The Director said nothing, but looked faintly puzzled.
“So,” continued Asheg, “either the problem was psychosomatic and went away between the first examination and the second, or it was never there at all. Given the amount of stress and fear that we’ve put her through in the last couple of days, I’d favour the latter explanation. That suggests to me that the first examination was just a convenient way for Hamesh to ‘accidentally discover’ something that he’d already known for a long time.”
“But that makes no sense at all!” the Director protested. “She went to him voluntarily. People do not visit a doctor if they think nothing is wrong with them.”
“Indeed, Sir,” Asheg nodded. “She might have decided to give herself up. Or been told to.”
“Why did she not come straight to us, then, instead of going through this complicated charade of being ‘discovered’ by Hamesh?”
“It might have been necessary for her to be caught, rather than to surrender. That way it would seem more plausible for her not to co-operate with us.”
“If Hamesh is her accomplice, he has betrayed her,” the Director observed. “Why is she refusing to talk, instead of taking revenge by informing on him?”
“She doesn’t know for sure who accused her, Sir. She knows that we think she has an accomplice, but she doesn’t know Hamesh is our prime suspect for that. She probably thinks he’s still loyal to her. She might even think that he’s planning to rescue her somehow.” Asheg paused thoughtfully for a moment. “The other possibility is that, for Thander, the likely consequences of talking are worse than the likely consequences of remaining silent.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, Sir, it occurs to me that we might have been looking at this supposed criminal-accomplice relationship between Thander and Hamesh the wrong way round. Hamesh informed us of his suspicion that Thander was a misplaced exhumee. We saw that she was, and so we assumed that she was the driving force for that crime. To overcome the difficulties involved in staying here, she needed an accomplice, so we found one for her: Doctor Hamesh. He’s our prime suspect and, to be frank, Sir, I don’t think anyone else here could’ve done what would’ve been necessary. There’s just one problem, Sir, with casting Hamesh in the role of Thander’s accomplice.”
“Which is what, Lieutenant?”
“I don’t think he would’ve done it, Sir. To begin with, the doctor has never struck me as someone who’s overly concerned with his duties as a citizen. If he informs us of wrongdoing, it’ll be because he thinks there’s some advantage in it for him. I don’t know yet what that advantage might be. It could be the removal of a disadvantage--an opponent, perhaps.”
The Director raised an eyebrow.
“He admits that he doesn’t suffer fools gladly. What he doesn’t admit is that he considers almost everybody a fool. And he doesn’t like taking orders--particularly not from fools. I don’t think he’s the type to would hide an exhumee from us for five years, just because she asked him nicely. He’s not one of these ‘exhumees have rights too’ people, who want to set all the exhumees free and give them the same rights as citizens, or even stop exhumation altogether. There would have to be some immediate, personal benefit. Unless Thander was exceptionally clever, she’d have had no money or property after her exhumation, which doesn’t leave much she could’ve offered him as payment.”
“Why do we employ him, if he has all those faults?” asked the Director.
“For two reasons, Sir. One is that, for all those faults, he is a very good doctor. The other is that we didn’t choose to employ him. He was forced upon us. Before he came here, he worked in a citizens’ hospital in Pelami. In 526, Security there discovered that he and another doctor, a young woman, had been stealing medical supplies from the hospital. She did the removal, and he edited the records to cover her tracks. They never found out where the supplies were going, or why this woman was stealing them. The supplies weren’t particularly valuable or dangerous--not drugs with high addiction potential or anything like that. My guess is she had some psychological problem.”
“So again, we have Hamesh helping a criminal for no apparent reason,” remarked the Director, “which you say is out of character for him.”
“Yes, that was as much as Security managed to prove, Sir,” Asheg replied. “The reason they found out about it was that the woman came to them and told them Hamesh was blackmailing her. He didn’t want money--she had precious little of that. He wanted sex--quite degrading and painful sex, to judge from her testimony, which isn’t always very coherent. Unfortunately for her, there was no evidence of this, so it was just her word against his, and Security decided in Hamesh’s favour. She was convicted of the theft of about 8,000 senars-worth of supplies, and went to the freezer for it. He was convicted of aiding and abetting her, and was demoted and sent here. By the time you and I arrived, Sir, he’d behaved himself for long enough for Security to stop watching him closely, and the whole matter had been forgotten.”
“I can’t help wondering if they got those sentences the wrong way round,” said the Director.
Asheg nodded. “If they’d believed her, he’d probably have gone to the freezer too. But they didn’t, so he’s here instead.”
“I think we can guess now what Thander offered Hamesh as payment for hiding her,” said the Director, a little uncomfortably.
“Or what Hamesh demanded,” Asheg pointed out. “I think that’s more likely, Sir. I’m no expert on sexual attraction, particularly not from the female point of view, but I can’t see Thander voluntarily becoming Hamesh’s partner. She might tolerate him for a month or two, but surely not for five years. So when she was exhumed, she knew that she would almost certainly go to a labour camp, and she asked Hamesh to hide her here. He replied: ‘Gladly, if you’ll be my bed partner.’ She, having no other choice, reluctantly agreed.”
“How did she know he would agree to hide her,” asked the Director, “instead of coming straight to us?” She looked unsettled at the direction the discussion had now taken. Sex between a citizen and an exhumee was not actually illegal, but there were many who believed it should be.
“Perhaps she was willing to gamble,” suggested Asheg. “It could’ve been the other way round, though. He might’ve said to her: ‘Be my bed partner, and I’ll see to it that you stay here.’ He might even have gone looking through the national register for a pretty young woman with the kind of personality who would agree to such a bargain.”
“You can be disgusting sometimes, Lieutenant.” The Director’s expression had gone from unsettled to appalled.
Asheg looked down slightly. “I’m sorry, Sir. Just speculation. But we have to consider possibilities like that if we’re to solve this case.”
After a pause, the Director’s expression returned to something more normal. She asked: “That reminds me, though. What were the results of the DNA search?”
“No trace, Sir.” Thander hadn’t appeared when he’d searched the national register for her genetic profile. That bothered him. There was no-one called Thander on the register, though it was to be expected that she would have changed her name. There was no-one who looked like her, either, though it was possible--even likely--that Hamesh would have carried out some cosmetic surgery on her. The mediscan that Asheg had run hadn’t shown any traces of such surgery, but Hamesh was probably skilled enough to hide them. “It should have found her,” he said indistinctly.
“If she is on the register at all,” the Director remarked. “Remember that full records start in 422. She could well have been frozen before then.”
Why didn’t I think of that? Asheg wondered. Hastily he offered: “Or she could be a foreigner.”
The Director gave an amused smile. “A spy?” It was a sad comment on the state of their country’s international relations that the two words were very similar in their dialect of Athic. “That hardly seems likely. We can account for her movements over the last five years. She has been outside the perimeter fence about three times. How many state secrets do you think she has discovered here?” She smiled again, benignly. “Forget about the register. She will tell you far more about herself than it can.”
Not yet she hasn’t, he thought.
“Now,” she continued, “how do you propose to use the 20 hours that remain to us?”
There were rather less than 20 hours remaining now, after all the time they’d spent talking. But the Director didn’t like to have that sort of thing pointed out to her. “Well, Sir,” said Asheg, “what I’d really like to do is use the strip miner on Thander or Hamesh--preferably both.” “Strip miner” was actually the device’s nickname, given because of its similarity to a technique of mining material that was concentrated close to the surface: dig a big, shallow pit and gradually deepen it, filtering what you want out of each layer of soil. It wasn’t quite mind-reading, but it would serve admirably until that became possible.
“We discussed this yesterday, Lieutenant,” she replied primly, “and my position has not changed since. As soon as you show me some evidence that justifies the use of the device, you will have my permission to use it on anybody implicated. Until that happens, I absolutely forbid it.”
Asheg hadn’t really expected the Director to change her mind, but you could never tell. Oh, he’d proven that Thander was an exhumee who’d been here illegally for the last five years, and he’d done it right in front of the Director’s eyes. But there was no evidence of anything else. Saying that she must have had an accomplice, or that other crimes must have been committed in order to keep her here, didn’t make it so. It was tempting to try to bend the rules far enough to justify using the strip-miner, just to see what it uncovered. But the Director would never agree to that. The strip-miner presumed guilt, or at least knowledge. Setting it to work on somebody who was innocent or ignorant was likely to reduce the subject to mewling idiocy, as it pummelled the brain in an aggressive search for something that wasn’t there. That was why the rules demanded some evidence before it could be used. Even a misplaced exhumee was too valuable to destroy like that.
Asheg looked down again. “Unofficially, Sir,” he began, and then looked up to meet the Director’s wary gaze. “I feel that my department is out of its depth in this investigation.”
“Are you requesting my permission to turn the case over to Provincial Security?” she asked.
“No yet, Sir. I thought it might be wise to ask your opinion first.”
“It is wise. And wiser still to ask unofficially.” She was silent for a moment, and then continued: “Under other circumstances, I would allow it. However, this case is more than just a matter of catching the criminals. There is the base’s reputation to consider, as well as your own professional pride.”
Asheg was seldom too proud to admit that a problem’s solution was beyond him, but Serendipity Base’s reputation was another matter.
“Five years is a very long time for an ex to be placed illegally without being detected,” the Director continued. “The fewer people know the details of this case, the better. Given the choice between--perhaps--letting a criminal worse than Thander go free, and ruining the reputations of this base and a good many of the people who work here, I have no hesitation in choosing the first option.”
The outside calls for Hamesh continued--about six or seven each year, although the intervals between them varied a great deal. He learned that they were called the Fellowship--an oddly archaic term, though a fitting one for a group so obsessed with the past and its inhabitants. Their question was always the same: details of exhumees born before 120 who had been exhumed since the last call.
Sometimes they rewarded him with a snippet of information about Mandarin. They refused to tell him how they decided whether to do this, but it seemed to have some correlation with the number of exs--the more he told them of, the more likely they were to give him something in return. Once or twice he considered making up additional exhumees to test this hypothesis. After all, they couldn’t possibly check the names that he was giving them. Everybody born within the last century or so was on the national register, but people older than this were added to it only on exhumation. Before that, the only source of information about them was a computer that was part of each mausoleum, known as the datastream. Access to that was restricted to historians only. At the time, he had only a vague understanding of how it worked. There were rumours that without extensive training, use of it was extremely dangerous--even lethal.
But it seemed likely that the Fellowship would have data gatherers like himself in some, perhaps many, of the places that exhumees were sent to after Serendipity Base. Once they knew of the (alleged) existence of an exhumee they were interested in, it would be a simple matter to ask someone at the ex’s destination whether he had arrived there. If he had not, the obvious conclusion would be that Hamesh had been lying. The doctor wondered how they would react to that discovery. The memory of the attack by Alith made him reluctant to find out. He wondered how he might defend himself if he was attacked again. It was a simple matter to subdue someone who had a regulator, but he had no idea how well he would fare against one who could fight back. He wondered how the Fellowship might slip someone past the base’s perimeter security. It seemed not to have presented any problems to Alith. Then it occurred to him that an organisation as habitually secretive as they were might very well have someone else at the base already.
Thander sat down on the bed in her small cell, deep within Security’s area of Serendipity Base. Somebody from Security--possibly more than one person--had been interrogating her for most of the day. Always the same questions, over and over. How did you enter Serendipity Base? How did you obtain your false identification? Who helped you to do that? Who’s been concealing you while you’ve been here? How many other exhumees are there among the workers here? The answers were, respectively, in a sarcophagus, it was given to me, Hamesh, Hamesh again, and none that I know of. But she had said nothing, refusing to answer questions. What little hope she had left depended on Security discovering no more about her than they knew already. Doubtless, her involuntary reactions to some of the questions had told them that she was hiding something, but by themselves they had too many possible interpretations for Security to be able to bring any further charges against her.
To give them their due, they had tried their best to make her talk. They had shouted at her; they had put her under bright lights; they had deprived her of sleep; they had starved her; they had stripped her down to her underclothes and made her lie on the floor in a cold room. They had even switched on the pain inducer in her implant and given her a few jolts of level three. It had taken them a while to think of that; the officer whose idea it had been would probably be commended for it.
Unfortunately for Security, even their best couldn’t begin to approach what Hamesh was capable of. The willpower that she’d needed to keep silent these last few days was nothing compared to what was called for to stop herself crying in front of Hamesh. Even the pain from the implant, which they’d been certain would coerce her into revealing everything, had been only a minor discomfort. Whoever had designed that part of the implant had misunderstood pain, or perhaps had misunderstood the human reaction to it. It was like trying to hurt a person with a loud noise that was too high-pitched for her to hear. She had screamed when the officer had pressed the button, but more because she had felt that it was expected of her than because it actually hurt.
She wasn’t sure of how long Security had been questioning her, and she found that rather worrying. She was fairly certain she’d been in this room before now, so at least one night must have passed since her arrest. Had there been more than one? She knew about the 72-hour rule--having arrested her, Security had that amount of time to question her and gather further evidence. That was one reason she had told Mandarin to keep her office door locked for 120 hours after she had said: “All right. I’ll come with you.” She felt she could keep silent if there were only 24 hours of the 72 remaining, but she was less confident that she could keep it up for 48. It was possible that they would bend or even ignore the rules and keep her under arrest for as long as it took them to find--or fabricate--the evidence they wanted.
Nevertheless, she was determined that they would learn nothing from her. If Hamesh was to be believed, they would find nothing elsewhere, either.
If Hamesh was to be believed. Why should she trust him now, after five years of abuse and torture?
Because he still had the threat of something worse if she didn’t co-operate with him for this one last time. And she still had no guarantee that anyone would believe her if she tried to expose him. In this aspect, at least, their relationship was the same as it had always been.
Matthew and Debbie must have felt something like this, she thought, back in Anno Domini 2004--knowing that an end to their suffering would come soon, yet not knowing when; wanting that end, and yet fearing it. One obvious difference was that she had no reason to want to delay the end.
She decided that she had best try to sleep while she could, and lay down on the mattress. Something dug into her shoulder. She shifted around, thinking it might be a large wrinkle in the fabric, but found she couldn’t get rid of it. She sat up again and ran her hand over the area. There seemed to be something small and hard under the mattress, something which hadn’t been there before. She lifted the mattress and pulled out--
--an implant programmer.
For what felt like far too long, she held it, staring at it, unable to believe the evidence of her eyes. Had a corpse suddenly jumped unaided from its sarcophagus, that would have been marginally less astonishing than the presence of this slim grey rectangle. She sat down on the mattress, turning the programmer over and over in her hands. It was about 12 centimetres by 10 and looked like a much smaller version of a communicator screen. Most of it was taken up by a display, which showed the results of communication with an implant. At the side of this was a strip of four small buttons. She had seen programmers a few times, although she had never actually been allowed to handle one. In the course of her research, she had sometimes had to ask Security to use one to make it possible to interview an important historical figure who proved to be particularly reticent or objectionable.
Hamesh had used a programmer on her in the early days, to help ensure her obedience. He had instructed her implant so that certain phrases, spoken by him, would cause it to push her limbs into certain positions. At first, he gave her no choice in the matter: he commanded, and her body obeyed. Then, he gradually reduced the compulsion level to a point where, by a superhuman exertion of willpower, she could prevent, say, one forearm from going where he wanted. He took care to arrange matters so that forearm often needed to be where he wanted it to stop her from falling flat on her face. Then, he changed the programming so that when he said one of the key phrases, she could do whatever she wanted, but received a jolt of pain whenever she did something that was contrary to the implant’s instructions. The more she diverged from the “correct” movements and positions, the worse the pain was. His desire was that eventually, she would comply even without pain or coercion from the implant--“teaching her the love of obedience,” he called it. He got his way in the end, of course. It took him longer than he expected, but he could be very persistent if he wanted something badly enough. After that, he had used a programmer to monitor the pain reading from her implant, to gain accurate data on how much each technique of torture hurt her. There was some comfort to be drawn from the fact that the implant didn’t tell the whole story: it gave a single number, a weighted average over her whole body, which summarised several different kinds of pain. Under less extreme circumstances, she would have been offended that something so personal, so intimate, so human, could be reduced and abstracted thus. As it was, she was grateful in a way, for his faith in the readings from her implant prevented him from mapping her vulnerability completely.
She wondered how the programmer had come to be here. Somebody must have put it there since the last time she slept. Who, though? And why? Was she supposed to find it? If so, what was she supposed to do with it? Or was it here for some other reason entirely, quite unconnected with her? Unlikely: a programmer could cause a lot of damage in inexperienced or malicious hands, and access to the base’s store of them was very tightly controlled. That limited the number of people who could have put it here. It didn’t really seem plausible that anybody who was trusted with something so powerful would wander into Thander’s cell, tuck it under her mattress, and then forget about it. It must have been put here because she was here.
There was no point in speculating any further. One of the buttons was labelled ON/OFF. She touched it.
Two lines of text appeared on the display, written in the oddly-worded subset of Athic that was used to program the implants:
when pain > 24
say “A cleaner exit, my dear.”
As an instruction for an exhumee’s implant, it was meaningless. About the only things that could cause a pain level greater than 24 were life-threatening injury, or the specialised implant controllers used in prison camps. The controllers that Security had here only went as far as 10, and someone had once told her that nobody dared use anything over seven. Even Hamesh had never been able to get her reading above 13.5.
And then, when the pain level was high enough to be close to death, making the exhumee utter the words: “A cleaner exit, my dear” was entirely pointless. Only a sadist with a taste for melodrama would load such an instruction into an implant. It would have been more practical--or at least merciful--to render the exhumee unconscious, or even shut the implant down altogether, thus ensuring that she would be dead within a few minutes.
Was that instruction meant to be loaded into an implant, though? Given her conclusion that the programmer had been put here for her to find, might not the instruction actually be a message for her? From whom? Whoever put the programmer here, presumably. Now that question was more easily answered. Probably by now, every worker at Serendipity Base knew of her arrest, but only one of them addressed her as “my dear.” Hamesh.
What did he hope to achieve by putting such a powerful tool into her hands? Did he intend she should use it to escape? Did he really love her, then, as he had claimed to just before informing Asheg about her? Or did he simply not have it in him to bring about her death himself? She could use the programmer to switch off her implant’s pain inducer, and block real pain as well... but as soon as Security figured that out, they’d switch it back on again. She could stop the implant from broadcasting the signal that allowed Mandarin to know where she was... but she couldn’t restore her old identity, which she would need to pass through almost any door in the base. In spite of its power, then, the programmer was useless to her. Hamesh must know that, so it seemed unlikely that he meant her to escape with it.
Was he taunting her--giving her something that he knew was of no value to her, or which she was unable to use? If so, he was taking an immense risk. Mandarin would know that Hamesh had removed this programmer from the store and, within a few days, it would inform somebody that he had neglected to return it. But Hamesh could edit Mandarin’s records... It would be a trivial task for him to remove all knowledge of the programmer from Mandarin’s memory. He could even adjust the records to say that Thander was the one who had taken it.
Should she inform Security about the programmer? Unwise: it would be difficult to prove that Hamesh was the one who had put it there. Whether or not anything was proven, Hamesh would probably view her action as “trying to drag him down with her,” and the evidence which he had suppressed would resurface.
There was one other thing she could do with the programmer--besides tucking it back under the mattress and pretending it wasn’t there. She pressed the button labelled Listen. Then she held it close to the back of her neck and said quietly: “Identify the implant.” It gave a quiet beep to indicate that it had understood and obeyed her command. That confirmed that it was functioning properly. In place of Hamesh’s putative message, the programmer now displayed her implant’s serial number and activation date. Hamesh had removed the other identification details not long after exhuming her. That was supposed to be impossible, but as he had remarked at the time, he had never let other people’s opinions stand between him and his goals. Security had put back the only item of data they were sure of--her name.
Should she do this? What did she have to lose? She touched the Listen button again.
No. This is wrong. It shall not be.
She let go of the button and took several deep breaths. Her eyes felt damp. “It’s less wrong,” she whispered. “Can’t you understand that?” Her hands were trembling; with some effort she pressed Listen once more.
Some things are always wrong. You will be discovered. You will be punished.
By the time I’m discovered, it’ll be too late, she thought. Summoning every scrap of willpower, every slight ambiguity in the situation, every technique she had discovered for resisting the regulator’s demands, she compelled herself to utter the words: “De-ac-tiv-ate the im-plant.”
There. She’d done it. The regulator screamed outrage and fury at her, louder and more forcefully than she had ever known it. She fell backwards, and her head struck the wall, hard. But it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered anymore. She had broken the rules. Without realising it, Hamesh had given her exactly what she wanted.
She struggled to sit up and blinked away some of the tears that the regulator had brought to her eyes--
--on the floor between her feet lay the implant programmer, upside down. Nervously, she snatched it up. On its display were the words:
No command recognised
She collapsed face down on the mattress, sobbing. Its work done, the regulator ceased its chastisements. Either she had spoken the command too slowly for the programmer to understand it, or it had slipped from her hand before she had finished speaking. The programmer wasn’t particularly intelligent in its understanding of Athic; that was what the Listen button was for. You had to hold that button down for all the time that you were giving it instructions; otherwise it assumed you were talking to someone else. Her implant was still functioning normally. Now that the regulator knew what she was planning, she would need even more strength and guile for a second attempt. She was too exhausted to try now. Those ten seconds of sheer determination had drained her in a way that hours with Hamesh had never done. She rolled onto her side, facing the wall. Tears streamed down her face and soaked into the mattress. Hamesh must have been taunting her by giving her the programmer. He must have known that she wouldn’t be able to use it. She clutched it to her breast as if it was the only thing between her and damnation.
Eventually, Thander slept.
Mard arrived at Serendipity Base after an uneventful journey. His passage through their security was a formality. He had been here before a few times, several years previously, on exhumee collection duty. Nothing seemed to have changed since.
Hamesh was waiting for him on the other side of the perimeter. That was different. Before, he’d been escorted by low-ranking workers who couldn’t be trusted with anything more important. The doctor raised his hand in greeting, fingers apart as usual, but with the ring and little fingers together, signifying that he was a Fellow. Mard returned the gesture. “Come with me, please,” said Hamesh curtly. He turned and walked briskly along the corridor that led away from the entrance.
“You’ve put on weight since I last saw you,” Mard remarked, once he had caught up with him.
Without looking at him, Hamesh said from the corner of his mouth: “I think it’s best for both of us if you don’t admit that you know me. I’m currently under investigation by our internal security regarding a matter relating to the person you’ll meet shortly. I don’t think anything will come of it, but if anything does, things won’t go too well for anyone they can connect with me.”
Oh, shit. Mard stepped in front of Hamesh and slapped a hand on each of his shoulders. “You fucking idiot,” he growled. “What in God’s name have you dragged me into?”
“I’ll drag you into a whole lot more if you don’t let go of me,” Hamesh snapped back at him. He clearly had to restrain himself from shouting that.
Mard didn’t move. “Is that meant to be a threat?”
“Yes.” Hamesh gripped Mard’s forearms and lifted them away from himself. Mard didn’t oppose him, but he felt the violent strength in the doctor’s hands.
“I’ve done nothing illegal,” Mard asserted.
Hamesh glared at him as if to say, Not yet. He gave the Fellows’ salute and breathed: “This is illegal. Remember?”
Startled, Mard said nothing for a moment. Then: “You’re playing a very dangerous game, Doctor Hamesh.”
“I’m well aware of that, Sergeant Mard. And I intend to win it.”
Mard stared at the Doctor through narrowed eyes. Hamesh was probably desperate enough to carry out his threat--and devious enough to escape the consequences. After all, he was already in enough trouble to want Mard to kill two exhumees for him. If Mard didn’t do that, and the exhumees did whatever Hamesh was trying to prevent, he’d probably feel that he had nothing more to lose anyway. All the same, Mard was sorely tempted to return to Camp Fidelity and leave the obnoxious Doctor to his own devices.
He couldn’t do it. Partly it was fear of the revenge that Hamesh would take, and partly it was the obligation of Fellowship. Hamesh’s demands were within the laws that the Founders had laid down, although they might have worded them differently if they had known how Hamesh would interpret them.
“All right,” Mard said heavily. “You leave me no choice. I’ll do what you asked.”
They continued along the corridor, as if nothing had happened.
The work at Serendipity Base was largely routine, and left Hamesh plenty of time to pursue other interests. One of these was the question of how he had come to have a non-functioning regulator. He had found that the anomalous sequences in his genome coded for a number of enzymes which controlled the formation of a group of key cells that inhibited muscular activity. This inhibition could cause considerable pain. The rest of his regulator appeared to be present and functioning. That explained why he sometimes had severe headaches during or after making love to Thander. Something in his brain knew that what he was doing to her was against morality in some sense, and was trying as best it could to stop it.
Hamesh knew enough about genetics to be aware that the large number of differences between his genome and the reference one meant that his condition was unlikely to be the result of point mutations. He supposed it could have been caused by a disease or mutagen. It would have had to have occurred quite early in his life, as he remembered his regulator to have been broken even in the nursery. But then it would surely have been picked up during the routine scans that everyone received during childhood. Unless the condition was caused by a chameleon. These were nanomachines that initially hid within an inorganic sheath. They sampled their biochemical environment and replicated it within the sheath. They then dissolved the sheath, leaving something that looked exactly like the host’s own cells, that could then act without fear of attack from the immune system. He had seen twenty or thirty exhumees afflicted with chameleons (one with no fewer than four different types), and had found them next to impossible to track down, and harder still to treat effectively.
There were just two problems with the hypothesis that he himself had them. One was that he did not display any of the symptoms of any known type of chameleon. The other was that nearly all known types had been developed for use as weapons in the Genetic Wars, some six hundred years ago. The regulator had not been created for nearly two centuries after that. It seemed highly unlikely that a side effect of something designed to kill or incapacitate would be the rewriting of five precisely-selected regions of the genome that just happened to code for a vital component of something that would not exist for another two hundred years.
He got no further with the problem for several months. Then a father and two daughters were passed to him for exhumation. Family groups were rare among exhumees, and he was struck by the similarities among these three people’s genomes. In particular, they all had a recessive disorder that caused the skin to heal more slowly than usual. It was easily fixed now, of course, and the fact that the children had inherited it was, in itself, nothing remarkable, but it set him thinking about his own condition again. Could he have inherited it from one of his parents? He realised that if that was true, he would have replaced the question of the origin of his condition with the question of how they had reached breeding age without it being noticed. Nevertheless, he felt that finding out if either of them had had it would provide another piece of his puzzle.
He wondered how he could obtain copies of his parents’ genomes without it being obvious what he was doing. He couldn’t just query the national register for “parents of Doctor Hamesh”--an interest in your biological parents was seen as odd, bordering on perverse, and would certainly attract unwelcome attention. Nor could he submit his genome and ask for that individual’s parents (hoping that nobody would realise it was his), as there was too great a risk that one of the register’s computers would run an analysis on it.
Then it occurred to him that he could submit a part of his genome that was normal and ask for individuals who matched that. If the people who ran the register asked why he wanted that information, he could say that he was researching a mutation on the chromosome that he had submitted, and wanted to know how widespread it was in the general population, and whether certain genome types were more susceptible to it than others. It was close enough to the truth that he might even pass a lie-detector test.
So he did this. He expected that his first attempt would match millions of individuals, and that he would have to be more specific before he could retrieve a manageable amount of data. In fact, there were just 107 people in the register who had that same chromosome, and a datacube with their genomes arrived the following day. It would have been a simple matter to ask Mandarin to correlate those genomes with his own and tell him which were the parents, but he didn’t want to take the risk that the computer would realise whose genome was one of the inputs. Instead he persuaded the computer to treat the DNA sequences as raw binary data, shorn of meaning, and gave it instructions to look for matches with the anomalous regions of his own genome, base pair by base pair. Waiting for the results was painfully slow. Mandarin’s programming for genome matching had been honed over many years, and it had thousands of processing nodes all over the base to draw on if necessary. Hamesh, for all his skill with computers, had never written a program that was anything like this one, and so his code was very slow and inefficient. Out of continuing fear, he constrained the program to run on the few nodes near his office, that were not normally used by anyone other than him.
The program had been laboriously calculating for three days when he realised that his approach was too simplistic. Over 99% of the genome was identical across all modern humans. His code was unaware of this fact, and so would probably report a spuriously high number of matches. Reluctantly, he halted the program and, after consulting Mandarin’s copy of the genome map, modified it to ignore the invariant sections.
After 15 days, his communicator screen indicated that the program had finished. Eagerly, he called up the results, but his heart sank as he paged through them. He had told the computer to rank the individuals according to the percentage of base pairs that matched his own on that chromosome. He had expected that, if his condition was inherited, there would be one chromosome where the variant sections were nearly identical to his own, and the rest would have almost nothing in common. If it was not inherited, there should be no similarities. In fact, there was no nearly identical individual; most of the chromosomes showed similarities of between 70% and 85%.
His first thought was that he had made some mistake in his program. He looked again at its code, and manually compared a few hundred base pairs from the top match with his own. They matched on 279 pairs out of 302, or 92%. He looked at one of his anomalous regions, and the rate went up to 95%. Then an idea came to him. He ran the program again, with just his genome and the highest match as inputs, but looking at every chromosome instead of just one. This time, he had to wait only four days for the answer. To seven significant figures, the variant sections of the two genomes matched on 50% of their base pairs. It was too precise a figure for coincidence. He looked at each pair of his chromosomes in turn. (Chromosomes exist in pairs, each member of the pair being inherited from one parent.) In every pair, one chromosome matched the other person almost exactly; the other was completely different. He called up the summary of this other person’s genome, and paged down to the sex chromosomes. There were two Xs. He had found his mother.
For a long time, he sat there, not really thinking anything. He had been expecting a yes or no answer to the question of heredity, and had got neither. Certainly, his mother’s regulator had been unusual, but the differences between that part of her genome and his were still too great to be accounted for solely by point mutations. Some external influence must have been at work, and he was no nearer to finding out what it was than he had been 12 years ago, when the hospital mediscan told him he wasn’t fully human.
He wondered whether he was supposed to feel disgusted at being so close to his mother, if only in a metaphorical sense. He wondered what she looked like, how old she was now, what she might be doing. Was she alive, or in a mausoleum somewhere?
Perhaps most importantly, had her regulator worked or not? It wasn’t a question that normally had to be considered. People born after 120 had regulators; those born before did not. He was vaguely aware that the transition had not been an immediate one: the regulator had actually taken some 30 years to perfect. Could his mother have been born during that period? People had been freezing eggs and sperm for centuries, and a good many citizens were created from cells whose donors were long dead. However, Hamesh had never heard of anyone being conceived from cells as old as his mother’s would have to be.
And in any case, how had her eggs passed the DNA scan before being allowed to be fertilised? Presumably, the same way that the embryo that became him had passed it. In other words, he had no idea.
He queried the national register again, asking for dates of the people whose genomes he had found. About a third had only dates of exhumation, which were effectively meaningless. The one he had identified as his mother was born in 125, making her the oldest in the group, although there was an uncertainty of 15 years about the date. She had been exhumed, but there was no date for that event. There were one or two people born in each decade after her, up to 490, when the average leapt to about 10 per decade. He wondered what the significance of the increase was. He himself had been born in 496.
He thought back to Alith’s words on the subject: “We’re especially interested in anybody born before about 120.” Before the regulator became compulsory. He had supposed that the Fellowship wanted to recruit such people as members. It had never occurred to him to wonder what those members might be expected to do.
Hamesh led Mard to Internal Security’s offices. Lieutenant Asheg met them there and escorted them to the cells, where the exhumee was awaiting collection.
Her name was Thander. She was in her thirties, about one metre 70, with black, tousled hair. She looked as though she hadn’t slept for a week. She was dressed in the uniform of a worker--pale blue blouse, grey trousers, white tunic--instead of the grey overall of an exhumee. That made Mard uneasy, though he wasn’t sure why. Most of the time, her eyes were downcast, except for one moment when she looked straight at him with a hard, unnerving stare. Her expression said to him: “You don’t frighten me. I’ve survived far worse than you. You might bend me, but you’ll never break me.”
Asheg took a minute or so to complete the procedures to transfer Thander. The base’s computer recorded and authorised the transaction. Thander was now the property of Camp Fidelity and, as such, was Mard’s responsibility.
Hamesh accompanied Mard and Thander back to the base’s perimeter. As they were about to get into the car, Hamesh said in a low voice: “Be gentle with her, Mard. She meant a lot to me.”
Mard looked at him and replied softly: “You’re going to spend the rest of your life paying off this obligation-debt. In fact, I don’t think one life will be enough. You’ll still be paying when you’re in a camp.”
Hamesh just smiled.
When the car had begun its journey back to Camp Fidelity, Thander turned in her seat and said to him: “So you’re Sergeant Mard, then.”
Mard nodded noncommittally. It seemed an unnecessary question; his name and rank were printed in too-large letters on the left breast of his uniform.
“Hamesh has told me a lot about you,” she said conversationally. “He says you’re going to kill me.”
Night was falling when Mard and Thander arrived at Camp Fidelity. Holeth was on duty at the perimeter, as they had arranged. They went through the familiar procedure of checking Thander into the camp, neglecting a few steps whose omission probably wouldn’t be noticed until after Mard had finished his work for Hamesh. Once or twice, Holeth’s eyes caught his, and a little smile of triumph darted across her face. She would want the agreed payment when their shift finished in a couple of hours. He didn’t really feel capable of satisfying her tonight. Perhaps he should try to persuade her to wait until tomorrow, or the day after. But would he be any better able to keep his side of the bargain then? All he’d promised her was an hour with him, alone and undisturbed. He hadn’t promised that she’d enjoy it.
He couldn’t really think about what he and Holeth were going to do later, though. His thoughts were still dominated by Hamesh’s last words to him, and what Thander had said in the car.
Be gentle with her, Mard. She meant a lot to me. Since when did any ex mean anything to any citizen--particularly a citizen as self-serving as Doctor Hamesh?
So you’re Sergeant Mard, then.
Hamesh has told me a lot about you.
He says you’re going to kill me.
What in God’s name did the Doctor think he was doing?
Thander found the checking-in procedure a rather strange experience. Mard and his colleague asked a great many questions, but weren’t particularly thorough in searching her. They did pass her through a molecular resonance detector, a hollow horizontal cylinder about four metres long and two in diameter. It was a sophisticated device which identified chemical compounds by measuring the vibrational frequencies of the bonds between their atoms. Mard’s colleague, who was operating it, declared her to be clean. She wondered how she could possibly have passed this test, and then noticed that the machine was switched off. What did Mard think he was doing? Hamesh had said that this man would see to it that her career at Camp Fidelity would be very short, but that was no reason for him to cut corners on the administration. Or were they as slipshod as this with every exhumee who came through their doors?
Be gentle with her, Mard. She meant a lot to me. Was that why?
Eventually, her checking-in finished, and Mard’s colleague led her to the place where she would sleep. This was a large, low-lit room, crowded with grey-robed exhumees. Most of them were asleep, lying on the floor or on thin mattresses. Was this what she’d been avoiding for the last five years? She’d never been given the choice. Unfamiliar emotions jostled for control. This is what being drunk must feel like, she thought. She put a hand to her breast, felt the shape and reassuring solidity of the implant programmer beneath her tunic. She still couldn’t believe that Mard hadn’t found it. A smile spread across her face. She would break the rules yet. She found that she had to resist an urge to laugh.
From somewhere in the gloom, a surprised voice called: “Thander!” She turned, walked towards the caller. He was about her height, probably in his early 40s. His hair and face were thick with grime, and the curve of his back and the way that his arms hung at his sides indicated long, deep fatigue. Yet something in his gaze spoke of unbowed determination, of tenacity that would win through no matter what. “Thander?”
A moment passed before she realised him. “Matthew!” She hadn’t expected his appearance to change quite so much in the few weeks since she had last seen him. She supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised to be in the same room as him. To have put her with any other team of exhumees would have made unnecessary work for Mard and his colleagues. She raised her hand in the familiar gesture of greeting, and tried to look despondent for him. This was not a place where anybody was supposed to feel cheerful.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. “You shouldn’t be here.” He led her a little further into the room, indicating that she should sit down on one of the thin mattresses.
“Yes, Matthew, I should,” she said. He looked at her attentively, feeling the despair she had dredged up from within herself. “I’m an exhumee as well.” She took a deep breath and recalled the story she had prepared for him. She cautioned herself not to tell him too much.
“I was exhumed in 535, and I would’ve ended up in one of these camps if it wasn’t for Hamesh. He gave me a new identity and got me assigned to Serendipity Base.” She paused. Matthew made no reply, but looked disturbed. “He kept threatening to send me to one of the camps, if I didn’t submit to him. Then when you arrived, he thought that you and I were having some kind of affair. That made him jealous, so he arranged to have you sent here, to get you out of the way.”
“Yes,” said Matthew bitterly, “I found that out the hard way.”
“I’m sorry,” she replied, surprised to realise that she meant it. She looked down. “I tried to force him to bring you back. I was about to expose him when he sent me here.” She faced him again, turning the next part of the story over and over in her mind, before saying quietly: “He made it very clear that I won’t be here long.”
Matthew was silent for a moment, evidently not wanting to believe her. “How can he expect to get away with it?”
“He will,” she said flatly. “Though that hardly matters to us. You and I have become an embarrassment to him. We’re both due for a fatal accident--soon. Sergeant Mard will see to that.”
“Yes,” said another voice, “I’ve seen some very dubious accidents here myself...”
Panicked, Thander turned to look at the newcomer. Another exhumee, with an apparent age of 50 or 60, was ambling over to them. Was he an informer for the guards? How much of their conversation had he heard? Did it matter, given that Mard already knew that she was aware of Hamesh’s plans for her? He looked friendly, but informers often did.
“Oh, you haven’t met Milner, have you?” asked Matthew. “Thander, this is Milner, the gang leader. Milner, this is Historian Thander.” They exchanged wary gestures of greeting, and then Matthew added: “Don’t worry. You can trust him.”
“Why thank you!” said Milner, with mock surprise. He sat down next to Thander, on the opposite side from Matthew.
She looked from Milner to Matthew and back again, and motioned them to come a little closer to her. She desperately hoped that Matthew was right about Milner. Leaning over to Matthew, she said, her voice just above a whisper: “There is an alternative.” From its hiding place in her blouse, she took the programmer. She showed it to Matthew, trying not to let Milner see it. Nevertheless, there was a suppressed gasp from the gang leader.
“An implant programmer,” he said, staring at her hand. He looked like she had felt when she had discovered it in her cell. Turning to Matthew, he continued: “That can stop our implants from responding to the central transmitter...” She wasn’t sure what that meant, but it sounded as though Milner really was on Matthew’s side. If he was an informer, he was going to extraordinary lengths to trap Matthew.
“What is the alternative?” asked Matthew uncomfortably, evidently realising that Milner’s suggestion wasn’t what Thander had in mind. He looked puzzled by Milner’s reaction: probably he didn’t know how difficult it was to obtain a programmer, even legitimately.
“It can also deactivate your implant,” replied Milner.
“But that would kill you,” said Matthew, looking faintly appalled.
Milner nodded, and Thander explained: “I didn’t want to give Hamesh the satisfaction of whatever he’s planned for me, so... I stole this from him.” She judged that to be close enough to the truth.
“I’d keep a close eye on it, if I were you,” Milner remarked. “If the guards find it, you won’t get it back.” After a moment, he added: “Might I ask how they overlooked it when they checked you in?”
Thander hesitated. Evidently Mard’s lack of thoroughness at the camp perimeter hadn’t been typical of the guards. Milner must think that they already knew about the programmer. He might even think that they had sent her here deliberately, to trap him and Matthew. Unless she could allay his suspicions, he would call her bluff and summon the guards. They couldn’t fail to find the programmer on a second search.
She looked directly at Milner and asked him: “You don’t trust me, do you?”
For a moment, he was taken aback by her candour, and then he answered: “Frankly, no.”
“What can I do to show you I deserve your trust?”
Again, Milner was silent for a moment. Then: “Give me the programmer.”
She closed her fist around it and shook her head.
“Not permanently,” he said. “What I’m thinking of won’t take more than a minute.”
She considered the options. Again, she hoped Matthew was right about the gang leader. How well did Matthew really know this man? And how much was his judgement clouded by his need to find Debbie?
She handed the programmer to Milner. “One minute,” she told him. “No more.”
Milner switched it on and, holding it close to his neck, said: “Identify the implant.” The programmer beeped. He looked at its little display and nodded in approval. Then he brought it back to his neck and ordered: “Deactivate the implant.”
Almost immediately, Milner’s head fell forward. His hand dropped onto his shoulder. His torso began to slump.
“Milner!” cried Matthew. He scrambled towards the nearly-dead man. Without knowing why, Thander obstructed him. Milner probably knew what he was doing. If he didn’t... well, it was probably better for him to be out of the way.
An ugly wheezing came from Milner, followed by three laboured words: “Activate the implant.” The hand that was holding the programmer fell to the mattress, and his head rolled slightly from side to side. Gradually he raised his head and turned to look at them. Tears stood in his eyes. Weakly, he said to Thander: “Take it.” He took a few breaths and added: “I’m sorry I doubted you.” His implant had been switched off for, at the most, ten seconds. Two minutes would invariably cause death. Even after the worst that Hamesh had done to her, Thander had never felt as badly shaken as Milner looked now.
“Why did you do that?” Matthew demanded. “You’re never going to be able to meet quota now.” He looked at Thander as if it was somehow her fault.
Milner tried to shrug. “Couldn’t think of any other way to check it was real.”
Matthew stood up and sat next to Milner. He whispered something in Milner’s ear. The gang leader looked from Matthew to Thander and back again, disbelieving. He made an agitated reply. Matthew said something else, of which Thander caught the last two words: “...kill her.” Fear stabbed at her. He couldn’t be planning that, surely. He looked scared. Was he just reminding Milner that Mard was going to kill her?
A sharp voice cracked the gloom above them. “Attention. Shift start. Line up.” Around them, exhumees began moving towards the door through which Thander had come. Mumbling curses, Milner tried to stand. Matthew had to help him. When Matthew let go, Milner still looked unsteady.
“Your friend here has convinced me,” Milner said, giving her an impish grin. “Have you still got your toy?”
She nodded. It seemed an unnecessary question.
“You’re coming with us,” he continued. “We’re going to escape.”
Beta 14 were on the way to work again. Genes was near the middle of the line. The murderer Prentice was a few places in front of him, as he wished. There was a woman with him now as well, whom Prentice seemed not to want to let out of his sight. So the killer had a lover, now, did he? That would make Genes’ revenge all the sweeter.
Genes looked up again. Prentice and his woman had gone! He stepped outside the line. They were nowhere to be seen. He ran forward to where they had been, pushing aside some of the exhumees. “Where is he?” he demanded. The line began to come to a halt, as exhumees lost their places. “Where’s the murderer?”
“Break it up!” called Holeth, running towards Genes from the back of the line. She aimed her transmitter at him and fired. He and a few others near him fell to the ground, paralysed in that familiar hurt. Those who had not been affected drew back as Holeth approached. She released them, and they returned to their feet, shakily. Genes scowled defiance at her. “Get back in your line,” she snapped at the exhumees in general. Slowly, they began to comply. “I told you to leave Prentice alone,” she said to Genes, brandishing her transmitter at him.
“Prentice gone,” Genes replied sourly.
“What?” gasped Holeth.
“Prentice--gone,” he repeated in an exaggerated manner. “New woman gone too,” he added.
“Oh, shit,” she breathed.
Genes smirked and nodded.
Somewhere in the roof of a tunnel in Camp Fidelity’s mine, a small pebble, loosened by the vibrations of months of nearby digging, finally freed itself from the surrounding earth. It fell a little less than a metre before its path intersected the left forearm of Sergeant Mard.
Startled, Mard stumbled backwards, nearly falling over a trolley behind him. He swore under his breath and pointed his torch upwards. The roof looked secure, but he didn’t know enough about this sort of thing to be certain. He tried to concentrate on the task he had come here to do.
Another little ping came from his radio, reminding him that he had spent another minute here, another minute exposed to the slow poison that permeated the ground in this area to a depth of a kilometre or more. Data gathered from exhumees indicated that every ping represented between 12 hours and two days removed from his life expectancy. He knew he should be wearing a suit to protect himself, but he would have had to sign for it, which would have prompted unanswerable questions about why he needed to be in the mine. He took the radio from his belt. It showed he had been here for 31 minutes. The task was barely half-complete, and already, he was going to die perhaps two months younger than he would have done otherwise. Not for the first time, he wished Hamesh was here with him, hearing those pings, knowing that every breath was an insidious corrosion of his health. That would go some way towards settling the obligation-debt which the Doctor had so skilfully avoided.
He replaced the radio and took another explosive charge from the trolley. He ascended the stepladder and drilled another little hole in the roof. He inserted the charge into the hole and filled it in. When Prentice and Thander walked past this point (Holeth had instructions to keep them together, as near to the front of the line as possible), a radio signal would detonate the charge and twenty others close by. Doubtless several other exs would be caught, but that was just the way these things happened. They could be replaced easily enough.
The radio gave another ping. It was just too distracting. He unhooked the radio from his belt and switched the timer off. That was against regulations, but what the hell--he was breaking at least five regulations just by being here now, and probably another 20 by doing this job for Hamesh.
He was about to replace the radio when it chimed, indicating an incoming message. He didn’t answer. He was supposed to be in his office at the moment, and it was quite likely that the caller was looking for him there. He picked up another charge. The radio chimed again. Feeling that he had no choice, he pressed the Answer button. “Sergeant Mard,” he said.
“Sir, this is Holeth.”
“What is it?”
“Three of Beta 14 have absented themselves since they left their quarters.”
“Do you know which ones?” Mard was sure that he knew the answer already.
“Yes, Sir, Milner, Prentice and Thander.”
“You idiot, Holeth.” Mard tried not to shout. Those were exactly the names he’d expected. “I told you not to let them out of your sight.”
“Sir, I’m very sorry,” Holeth protested. “Genes was involved in another fight and--”
“Just find them, Holeth,” ordered Mard. “Take every guard you can get. I’ll join you as soon as I can. They’re most likely trying to escape. Stop them before they leave the camp.” He hesitated before finishing the order. Then, with renewed determination: “If you have to... kill them.”
There was a moment’s silence from Holeth. Then, her voice even quieter and more frightened than before, she answered: “Yes, Sir.”
Mard headed back towards the lift shaft. There was no time to put all the equipment back in its proper place. Probably no-one would notice in the upheaval. The entire shift, some one thousand exs, would have to be returned to their quarters while a search was carried out for the three who had absconded. He found himself hoping he was right in thinking that they were trying to escape. The unexpected ceasing of an ex nearly always provoked an inspection, but “deactivated while attempting to escape” on a report usually caused fewer awkward questions than “killed in a mining accident.” Accidents could be prevented; an ex’s desire to escape generally couldn’t. He remembered that he had longed for a clean, honourable solution to this mess when Hamesh first dropped it on him. It seemed now that, without intending it, the exhumees had given him just that.
The monitoring system showed that the door of Thander’s office had opened at last. Hamesh left his own office and walked through the few hundred metres of corridor that separated the two rooms. He had to make a conscious effort not to run.
The door was still open when he got there. Thander’s office was deserted. He looked up and down the corridor, listening for sounds of anyone approaching. He saw and heard no-one. Still, he hesitated to enter. The thought that the door might lock behind him was only the most obvious possibility.
But he had to go through that door, find out what it had been protecting these last five days. He had found Thander’s door locked not long after she had gone. He had managed to persuade Mandarin to tell him that someone had ordered it, but had not been able to find out who had given the order or what would make the door open again. From the monitoring system’s records, he had discovered that the door had been locked ever since Asheg had taken Thander to see the Director, so it was unlikely that Security had locked it, to keep it safe until they got around to searching it.
That meant that Thander must have been the one who locked the door, and behind it must be something that she wanted hidden, at least until she was out of the way of whatever its consequences might be. There was only one thing she could want to hide and then reveal like that. The existence of her secret, intense relationship with him. If the jealous, uncomprehending men from Security ever became aware of that, and of the crimes he had committed in her name so that she could remain with him, he would surely be condemned to a prison sentence far worse than she would have received, had it not been for his careful editing of the evidence against her. She, meanwhile, would enjoy a swift, merciful death by rockfall or subterranean explosion. How typical of the ungrateful bitch! Where was the justice in that?
But... no matter what she might accuse him of, no matter how compelling her testimony, she could do nothing without other evidence. That was a well-established principle of law. In spite of what he had told her, there was still some evidence against him. It was old and well-hidden, but it was there for anybody who knew where to look--or who was prepared to spend the time and effort required for an exhaustive search. Nevertheless, even if Thander didn’t know precisely what the evidence was, whatever she had been hiding might just be scandalous enough to wreck his reputation, if any of it found its way out of Security...
Resolutely, he entered Thander’s office.
Even so, he turned around suddenly when he was inside, as if expecting to catch the door in the act of closing. He felt rather foolish to see that it was still open. He went back to the door and closed it, but did not lock it.
Thander’s office appeared little changed from the few times he had visited it previously. Somewhere amongst all the papers and books and datacubes on her desk and shelves might be a page, maybe even just a sentence, of accusation. If he could find it, and destroy it... But it could take him hours to find it, and even if he was undisturbed in that time, he couldn’t risk leaving his sweatprints everywhere for Security to ponder.
“Good afternoon, Doctor Hamesh.”
He looked up, horrified. He hadn’t heard the door-- “Mandarin!” His feeling of relief at the fact that the newcomer was only the computer was rapidly overtaken by suspicion and worry. Mandarin never appeared of its own accord. It was highly unlikely that any of his standing orders to it happened to have their conditions fulfilled just now. That meant that it was here because someone else had told it to appear. Someone who knew where he was and, in all probability, what he had come here for.
“Why are you here?” Hamesh demanded.
“Merely,” the computer replied, “to draw your attention to this datacube.” It pointed to one of those articles, which rested on the top of one of Thander’s ornaments, that pointless drinking vessel that she had copied from one of her books.
“And why,” he asked, “are you doing that?”
“I cannot tell you.”
Hamesh was about to ask: “Cannot? Or will not?” but remembered that in Mandarin’s case, there was little difference. This type of computer had little free will. It was designed for administrative, not executive, duties. It carried out decisions; it did not make them. Instead, he asked it: “Were you ordered to do that?”
“I was.”
“Who gave you the order?”
“I cannot tell you.”
Hamesh nodded thoughtfully. Probably it didn’t know why it was supposed to bring the datacube to his attention; people seldom bothered to tell the computer why they wanted things done, since it seldom asked. It would normally have told him who had given it the order, so it must have been ordered not to reveal that. Suddenly, as if to catch the computer off-guard, he asked: “Was it Historian Thander?”
A human might have rewarded him with a look of shocked guilt. Mandarin, though, remained impassive as it repeated: “I cannot tell you.”
“What does the datacube contain?” Hamesh asked.
“I do not know.”
“Is there anything you can tell me?”
“Many things,” said Mandarin, without irony. “What do you wish to know?”
“I meant,” said Hamesh, grinding the words out, “is there anything that it is important for you to tell me at this particular time?”
“No, Doctor,” it said politely.
“Then dismiss.”
When Mandarin had gone, Hamesh looked thoughtfully at the datacube it had pointed out. Despite the computer’s reticence, he had no doubt about who had put it there. It couldn’t have been anyone other than Thander. What did the cube contain, then? And why had she wanted it to remain hidden until now? Did it contain accusations against him? If so, why had Mandarin told him about it? Maybe Thander had just told the computer to point out the cube to anyone who entered the room. Or was it perhaps a farewell message? There was only one way to find out.
Could he afford to take the risk that someone would notice the cube was missing, if he stole it? Thander had obviously told the computer about the cube; she--or it--could easily have told others. But could he afford to risk the damage to his reputation, maybe even the criminal proceedings, that might result if someone else had the cube instead? Both of the options before him had risks. Choose the option with the lower overall risk, then. But which was that? There were too many unknowns for an objective decision.
“Oh, fuck it,” he muttered. Without further hesitation, he put the datacube in one of his pockets and headed back to his office.
“Left!” Milner called weakly from somewhere behind them. Thander and Matthew obeyed, turning down a narrow, roughly finished tunnel, barely ducking in time to avoid a low beam in the ceiling. About 20 metres along the tunnel, they heard a cry from Milner. Turning, they saw that he had tripped and fallen.
“Stupid, arrogant,” he muttered as they hurried back to him. “Should’ve known better than to switch off my implant. You might’ve got away with it, but I’ve been here too long. Poison’s got to me... You’ll have to go on without me.”
Matthew shook his head. “No, we’ll rest a while.”
“No, no,” the gang leader replied. “The guards can’t be far behind. You must keep moving.”
“But how will you escape?” protested Matthew.
“I’ll find a way.” For a moment, Milner’s old grin returned. Then: “And if they catch me, well, I’m probably too weak to survive much interrogation.” From somewhere in the distance came the sound of many pairs of booted feet, drawing closer.
“I guess this is where we say goodbye, then,” said Matthew awkwardly. “Thanks for everything you’ve done for us.”
“Any time,” Milner replied. Again, he smiled a little. “Now go!” he insisted, pointing in the direction they had been running. “And remember, left at the abandoned borer!”
Reluctantly, Matthew and Thander left the gang leader and resumed their journey.
Hamesh locked the door of his office and put the datacube into his screen’s player. The screen informed him that the cube contained just one file, an audio-visual recording, which had been made six days ago and lasted eight minutes and 31 seconds. He sat down, not surprised to realise that he was trembling. “Play,” he said hoarsely.
At once Thander’s unutterably lovely face appeared before him. She looked deeply troubled. How bitterly he regretted sending her to Camp Fidelity. But he had had no choice!
“I am Historian Thander of Serendipity Base,” she announced. “For the time being, at least. I expect I’ll lose that title before very long. If events have worked out as I’ve planned, by the time anybody watches this recording I’ll be dead. Not just gone into the dreamless sleep of the sarcophagus, but permanently dead, beyond any hope of exhumation.
“If I don’t appear concerned by that fact, it’s because I’ve had to learn to hide my feelings in the time I’ve been here. I’ve been working to bring about my death for some time. I want that more than anything.”
Hamesh could scarcely believe this. She wanted--suicide? Even the word was an obscenity in Athic. She had hidden her feelings well indeed; certainly Hamesh had never suspected it.
“I’m only too aware,” Thander continued, “of the regulator which prevents me from bringing about an end to myself by any obvious means.” Even she was unwilling to use that filthy word. “It makes my head hurt sometimes, just thinking about it.” How long, Hamesh wondered, had Thander spent just thinking about it, so that she wouldn’t be paralysed as soon as she tried to do anything towards achieving it?
“I don’t intend to say anything about how I’m going to do this,” she continued. “I suspect I’m not the only one who wants it. If the authorities knew how I’d done it, they’d doubtless take steps to close that route to others.”
There was movement at the edge of his field of vision. The door was open. Someone else was in the room. But he had locked it--hardly anyone had override codes for workers’ offices. That must mean--
“I think it’s only right, though,” Thander continued, “to try to explain the situation that’s driven me to this, in the hope that something can be done to prevent that situation from arising again.”
“Stop,” he said to the screen. It went blank. Hamesh turned to face the newcomer. It was Lieutenant Asheg from Security, the man to whom he had betrayed Thander. With him were a pair of underlings, evidently to guard against the possibility that Hamesh might become violent or attempt an escape. There was someone else behind them, not in uniform, whom Hamesh didn’t recognise.
“Doctor Hamesh,” said Asheg bluntly. It wasn’t a greeting, more of an accusation. “Stand in front of your desk. Keep your hands where I can see them. Do not make any sudden movements.”
Hamesh remained seated. “What is the meaning of this intrusion?” he blustered.
“Do as I say, Doctor,” Asheg told him. “I’m not in a mood for niceties of protocol.”
Hamesh complied with Asheg’s command, glowering furiously at him. Asheg stood at arm’s length from him and produced his formal identification. “Doctor Hamesh,” Asheg said, “in the name of the Director of Serendipity Base, I am placing you under arrest.”
“On what charge?” Hamesh asked incredulously.
“Initially, on two counts of theft. The first count is the theft of an implant programmer from the base’s medical stores. The second is the theft of a datacube from the office that was most recently assigned to Historian Thander. Depending on the results of our investigations, there may be further charges later. Now--are you going to tell me where those items are, or do I have to order a search of your office and sleeping quarters?”
“The datacube is in there,” said Hamesh, reluctantly, pointing to the screen’s playback unit. There was no point in trying to conceal it, since that would be the first place Asheg would look. “I don’t know anything about any programmer.” That was, strictly speaking, true, although he had a good idea of where to start looking for it.
“Are you sure?” asked the Lieutenant. “Now you’ve said that, it’ll look very bad for you if we find the programmer in one of your rooms.” Asheg smiled a little, as if he was certain that Hamesh was lying... or as if he was prepared to plant another programmer if he didn’t find the stolen one, just to secure a conviction.
“You won’t find it in one of my rooms,” Hamesh growled, “because it isn’t there.”
“As you wish,” shrugged Asheg.
“What are we waiting for, Lieutenant? We’ll get much more out of him in the interrogation suite.” This was the one who was standing behind the men from Security. Hamesh hadn’t paid her much attention until now. With a shock, he recognised her as the base’s Director. She was a little taller and older than Hamesh and pudgy, though not overweight. She was dressed in a close-fitting one-piece black suit which bore no resemblance to the base’s uniforms; her disdain for the sack-like clothing that people were supposed to wear here was well-known.
Asheg opened the player and retrieved the stolen datacube. They left the room, and Asheg used another override code to secure the door. Now Hamesh would be unable to enter his own office without the permission of Security. Evidently Asheg didn’t expect him to be returning here for quite some time.
They walked along the corridor, Asheg in front of Hamesh, his two underlings behind. Hamesh heard the Director saying softly to him: “I would have expected more subtlety from you, Doctor. It was quite easy, really. Thander needed an accomplice to bring her into the base and cover her trail in Mandarin’s records. You were the obvious suspect. What you told us about her was just a little too precise to be nothing more than shrewd guesses. When we found out that she had locked her office, we decided to wait for the five days and see if anybody wanted to enter it more badly than we did. Asheg thought we would stand a better chance of catching the real criminal that way, and I think he was right. I would be very interested to learn how you managed to arrive at Thander’s office so soon after Mandarin opened it.”
Asheg turned to them and signalled a halt. “Director,” he said, “with respect, I would ask you to keep your speculations to yourself for the moment. Doctor Hamesh is currently accused of two counts of theft, nothing more. Neither count has been proven yet. As well as that, I’d prefer he told us all of the truth, rather than just what he thinks we already know.”
“As you wish, Lieutenant,” replied the Director, looking down slightly. This was as close as she ever came to apologising to her own workers.
They continued down the corridor, towards Hamesh’s doom.
Nearing exhaustion, Matthew and Thander rounded a corner at the end of a long straight tunnel and found their progress blocked by a mound of rubble that filled the passage from floor to ceiling.
Thander sank to her knees. “The bastards,” she moaned. “They must’ve found this exit and blocked it off.”
“No, we must’ve taken a wrong turning,” Matthew countered, struggling to get his breath back.
“It was definitely left at that drilling machine, wasn’t it?” she asked. “And we came down a long tunnel, like your friend said?”
“Yeah,” Matthew nodded reluctantly. “Come on, we’ll go back to the last junction and try another direction.”
Thander didn’t move. Matthew put his head around the corner and ducked back rapidly. “Shit!” he hissed.
“What?”
“I saw some lights moving back there. They must be guards.”
“We’re trapped, then,” said Thander. She hadn’t really expected any other ending.
“They might not come all the way along. Or we could try to run past them when they get close.”
“They’ll paralyse us as soon as they see us. And even if we get past them, there are sure to be others nearby.” She reached into her blouse and pulled out the implant programmer. “This is the last freedom we have.”
Matthew looked at it unhappily. “There must be something else we can do.”
“No, nothing. If they catch us, they’ll make sure we don’t escape again.”
Matthew nodded again, remembering what Thander had said about Hamesh’s plans for both of them.
“Matthew” said Thander awkwardly, “there’s something I’ve got to tell you.”
“Can’t it wait?”
“No. It’s about Debbie.”
“Tell me,” he said, crouching down beside her. “Quickly.” They could hear the guards approaching now, walking slowly, as if to prolong the exhumees’ fear--or as if they were unwilling to confront what might face them when they turned the corner. (picture)
Thander knew what she had to say. She’d planned it weeks ago. But the words felt heavy within her. She told herself that she’d lost count of the lies she’d told, the truths she’d neglected to mention, to get herself this close to her goal. Would one more make all that much difference? Yes: this was the one that would let her reach it. “After you left the base, I managed to trace Debbie. I found she was exhumed two years ago, but... oh, shit, I wish I didn’t have to tell you this... she died not long after. Advanced cancer has always been difficult to treat. If she’d been frozen earlier, she might’ve lived. Her body would have been... cremated, I think, is the term. I’m sorry, Matthew.”
Matthew looked down, saying nothing for a moment. Tears began to burn through the grime on his face. Then: “You’re right. There’s nothing else we can do.”
She handed the programmer to him. “You just do what your friend did. You’ll have to use it on me first. My conditioning stops me using it on myself.” He gave her a rather strange look. Did he suspect? If he did, there was no time to do anything about it now. She closed her eyes and tried to relax.
“Identify the implant,” said Matthew, close to her ear. Beep. “Deactivate the implant.” Beep. For a second or two, there was a faint prickling at the back of her neck. “There. It’s done.”
The regulator was silent. Perhaps it realised that chastisement was futile. Within her was a feeling of lightness, of release, as though she had put down a heavy weight, or removed a piece of clothing that was too tight. “Thank you,” she said, surprised at how weak her voice sounded already. “I’ve waited so long for this. I’m sorry it has to be this way, but you were the only one who could give me what I wanted.”
From a distance, she heard Matthew say something that could have been: “Deactivate the implant.”
“I had an insoluble problem. The only way out was to cheat. I took advantage of you... almost the way Hamesh took advantage of me.” Some things are always wrong. “I’m sorry. I love you, Matthew. Goodbye...”
Almost too faint to hear, Matthew said: “Thank you... Goodbye, Thander.”
As consciousness began to slip away, she thought of the datacube she had left in her office. Someone must have discovered it by now. Someone must have discovered her orders to Mandarin and started asking awkward questions. Someone must have looked more closely at Hamesh. Not even he could avoid the consequences of his actions now.
But Hamesh didn’t really matter anymore. What mattered was that she had escaped from him and the system that had allowed him to abuse her. For the first time in her life, she was free. She began to smile...
The End
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Fraser Brown, John Kilby and my mother for their help with this story. I am especially grateful to Fraser for his work on the plot and characterisation. It was John’s idea to make Thander the protagonist. (In earlier drafts Matthew was the main character.) This change took rather more work than John reckoned it would, but I think it was worth it. Most of all, thank you to you for reading the book. If you enjoyed it--or even if you didn’t--I’d love to hear from you: email fiction at pembers dot net.